Tag Archives: tablets

It’s taken almost half of the school year for me to get here, but I’m finally ready to post a tour of my classroom for this school year.

I like to see inside of other people’s classrooms. Pictures posted on blogs and on twitter. Short videos on Youtube, or wherever else the inside of someone else’s space is showcased is always interesting to me. As teachers, we tend not to get around much. We don’t get the opportunity to talk about space and classroom design that often. Design is becoming ever more important, especially with studies like this one being released that show design to be an important factor in learning.

A bit of context about my space. My classroom is on the second floor of a two storey building. I have two large windows that face southwest. I am almost a neat freak in my classroom. I can’t work in a messy classroom. I think it serves as a distraction to a lot of kids. Now, that doesn’t mean that in the middle of projects that we don’t have a mess (I’m sure the janitors here curse me sometimes), but overall, I want things to be tidy.

Entering from the hallway, these shots are of my entire classroom:

I currently have 26 students in my class and try to support kids as many ways as possible. Some students prefer desks, others like tables. Some students want to work with others, others want to have their own space and prefer to work alone. I like to have “home” spaces such as desks and chairs, but I also like to have a few tables for small group work or other spaces (such as the green chair above) where a student can get away from their regular space and work somewhere else if they need to.

A few of my favourite things about my classroom are the couch and the huge National Geographic world map that I bought a couple of years ago. I also love the huge dragon mural on my wall. I teach middle school; who wouldn’t want a massive painting of a dragon?

I’m fortunate these days to have a large stable of technology in my classroom. I have two desktop imacs that are used mostly by the students in my video editing class but are open to anyone who wants to use them. I’ve just managed to acquire twenty new Dell laptops which we are putting to good use. I also have five Lenovo tablets which are used by my students for all sorts of things from basic research to serving as calculators when someone forgets theirs at home to being used as cameras, for playing math games, recording reflective videos, etc. At $200 each (bought before the Nexus 7 was available….) they were a good buy. About half of the kids in my classroom bring their own devices from home to use in class for different things. Ipods serve as ereaders and calculators, a few kids have tablets and about 10 of them bring laptops from home. All of this runs through the wireless network that is set up in my classroom.

My latest acquisition has been a 42 inch TV which I’ve had the maintenance staff at my school mount on the wall. This has quickly become part of a lot of things. I simply have an old laptop hooked up to it and I run a Powerpoint show on it all day in the classroom with all sorts of information on it. For example, we are currently studying structures in science class so I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures or different structures that I’ve taken on my travels. I had a consultant bring me some new books so I’ve taken a picture of them and uploaded it to the TV to promote these books. I have slides of current homework assignments, sports practice times in the school and other things. I have Scratch installed on my new laptops and some kids are beginning to play with it a bit. To promote this, and before we really get in to using it in the classroom, I’ve put a slide up for it, as many kids had never heard about it or used it before.

All of these things make for a full classroom so one decision I’ve made is to not really have a teacher’s desk. It simply takes us too much room and I’ve always found that I don’t sit down much during the school day anyway. I do have a shelf with a couple of drawers in it and this holds my laptop and other papers I need during the day.

So that’s a full tour of my classroom. It is a busy place filled with kids and their stuff and with plenty of different things going on. 26 kids + me + a full time education assistant + all sorts of technology = a busy, (hopefully) engaging place.

Over the next month, I’m going to see all sorts of tech configurations show up in my classroom. I still have some of the original Asus eee pc netbooks running a form of Linux, I have a cart of Dell netbooks, I have a Macbook Pro and an ipad. I spent some of my prize money from winning this CDW sponsored contest on four Lenovo IdeaPad A1 tablets. As well as all of these things, kids are welcome to bring their own laptops and devices from home to use in the classroom.

Using this kind of a system (if you can even call it that) in a classroom means that we have a difficult time talking about software and hardware. Kids start something at school on a school computer and need to finish it at home. They begin working on a project at night and need access to their files and information during the day. Google docs has solved many of those issues when it comes to text. Their model is simple and easy to use. Any device, anywhere, anytime. It simply works.

Lately I’ve been trying to find a way to support a similar model with video and audio. How can kids shoot a video, or interview someone, and have access to it later in another place, on another device?

A simple example:

I plan on having students do some reflecting using video and / or audio. I would also like to see the students in my classroom do more interviews with people in the school and in the community. Given all of these devices, there are any number of scenarios that might outline how this might happen. Basically, student A has a device and they go somewhere to record something. First of all, the hardware needs to actually have a mic or a camera. It needs to be portable. Once they have recorded their audio, they need to be able to export what they have recorded from that device either to the web or to another device and piece of software for further editing. If they are exporting to the web, the software needs to produce a file that others can access and that is embeddable in a space like a blog. If the file is to be exported to another device, it needs to be in a standard file format that can be worked with by other software.

In the end, I really don’t care about the hardware, as long as it satisfies a few basic needs. The same can be said of the software. As we jump from device to device, and from school to home and back, cloud based software makes our lives much easier, but I’m not about to be tied in to anything.

What I need as an educator working in this type of hybrid, multi location, multi operating system and device environment is the ability to move my data around between accounts and applications. I need to be able to share it, to embed it, to edit and remix it. We need a few basics from companies that will be cornerstones of what we do. WordPress, Youtube, Google docs, Sound Cloud, Dropbox all help us to do what we do.

Do you have others? Do you work with specific software or companies that empower you to move data and information around in all of its forms? Do you work in an environment like this? What helps you to do what you do?

I’ve spoken out a fair amount about tablets in classrooms. While I like them as a device, my concern has been that given the limited and finite resources available to schools, I’ve been wondering if schools are purchasing tablets when they could be buying cameras or microphones or full laptops that allow students more leeway to both consume information and to create.

I’ve been using a tablet on and off for the best part of a year. I’ve spent time with an Asus eee pad and a Blackberry Playbook (strangely I’ve never spent that much time with the all pervasive ipad). As I said, I like using a tablet. Living in a small town, I like the ability to purchase and download books instantly. I like the ability to jump between twitter, my book, a news app and email all with the touch of a finger. But I’ve noticed that I mainly use it for consuming information. I write email, 140 character tweets and notes about the book I’m reading. But I don’t use it for what I would consider to be intensive, high level, deeply creative tasks. Of course, this might be just me. It might be a changing paradigm of computing that I’m getting caught behind.

But still, overall I would consider a tablet to be mainly a consumption device. This was a great criticism I had of them.

But I’m wondering if that is fair.

Technology certainly has democratized the tools of creation. We can now create and publish to the world in any number of ways, using any number of media. This is the theory of technology as the great leveler. We now each have our own global printing press that we carry in our pocket.

But how many of us use it?

How many people actually use the tools we have available to us to write, to take great photos, to create videos or animations?

Certainly there are a lot more than in the past. Millions of blogs and flickr postings. Youtube videos uploaded by the millions of hours.

But many of these blogs and twitter accounts are short lived, only publishing a few items before being abandoned. Let us also be free to admit that a lot of what is published isn’t worth our time to look at.

So is the consume vs create paradigm a false binary? While we certainly want people to be able to create using the tools they are comfortable with and share what they make, is it reasonable to expect that all people will be high level creators? Should we be concentrating on these skills or should we instead be working to help people become informed consumers and curators of information since this is the most coman role they will find themselves in? What is the best use of time in our classrooms? What skills will people be called upon to use most often? A successful program will of course involve helping people to become successful consumers, curators and creators of information, but should “creation” be considered the top of pinnacle?

I don’t know a single person who’s recently bought a desktop computer.

Not one.

Combine that anecdote with the stats showing that for the first time more smartphones were sold than PCs and another that shows over the Christmas season of 2011, the number of people who owned either a tablet or an ereader doubled from 10% to approximately 19% and you can see that the computing world is in complete flux these days.

We want to take our technology with us.

Is it the data that we want to have with us, our files and pictures, or the ability to connect with others? Both?

A couple of years ago, this video was making the rounds at conferences and it seems like we are fully arriving at this point:

Our data, our connections, our services, our media, our learning. We want to take it with us. We want access no matter where we are. We what to switch from work to play and back again quickly and easily. A desktop computer used to sit in the corner of a room in our homes. It had its own desk. It was a place. Like the internet, it was a destination all its own. It was someplace you went to. “Going online” used to be a saying. I’m not sure it even applies anymore. We’re surrounded by devices that slip between internet access and media consumption seamlessly.

How do these societal trends change learning? How do they change how we need to structure classrooms? Are complete labs filled with computers an outdated model? Do we need infrastructure that is more seamless? Are classes that are focused purely on computers and technology an outdated model? Do we need more integrated systems?

Are schools still pursuing the desktop model of learning? Learning as a place, a thing that is separate and sits off in the corner all on its own when really we should be looking at something much more integrated and faster moving?

New technologies make new things possible. They allow us to move in new directions and consider new possibilities. We need to keep moving.

Tablets have taken the world by storm. This isn’t a secret. I’ve probably seen as many ipads in the past year in people’s bags as I have laptops. People that would never carry a laptop have no problem being seen with a tablet. While there are certainly a lot of tablets out there, you can probably argue that there is an ipad market, and then a bunch of others.

In October, Wired released stats saying that 97% of all tablet internet traffic is produced by people using ipads and another site stated that over 80% of all tablets sold are made by Apple. That may be changing slightly this Christmas season, but these stats are probably basically still true.

I’ve spent my time with two different tablets this fall and neither of them are ipads. I’ve got an Asus eee transformer and now my son has a new Blackberry Playbook that he received for Christmas. Both of these machines have performed well. The eee pad hooks to the Android Market, is responsive, has a great display and flips between applications easily. The new Playbook has only been around for a few days, but I have to admit – I like it. It is a bit smaller (a 7 inch screen compared to the standard 10), but it is well designed and feels nice in your hands. It doesn’t feel like a cheap piece of plastic. It has a great screen and runs RIM’s own operating system which is proving easy to learn and allows for full multi tasking. It handles flash content easily and renders the web quickly. It’s downfall comes in the size of its applications market. RIM is obviously a 3rd player in the tablet wars and it shows in what is available. Big news last week when Angry Birds hit Blackberry’s App world, months after the Android Market and the App store. No movies to rent. I can’t find a decent WordPress app. While there are certainly thousands to look through, some of the standard ones are simply not there. Plenty of rumours about RIM allowing access to the Android Market (which would solve all of their problems), and about people jailbreaking their Playbooks, but nothing official from RIM yet.

Both of these devices have been great to have around to pick up when you need to get online quickly to find a piece of information or to post to twitter, etc. but I’m still having trouble seeing them as machines to do anything other than read and surf from. I can’t see them as creative platforms.

I know districts have spent millions on tablets, I know people will disagree with me, telling me stories of all of the wonderful things they have done (or had their kids do), but I’m still not convinced. Don’t get me wrong, I like the ones I’ve lived with for the past few months. I think they are great devices and are getting to be powerful multimedia platforms. But what place should they have in our classrooms? Are we aiming only at an education based on the consumption of media and information? If every student (or classroom) could have tablets and laptops, then I think we are getting somewhere. But we all know that with budgets like they are, that isn’t happening in most schools any time soon. I am interested instead to see where schools are going to go with devices like the new Raspberry Pi initiative. That interests me. What can we do with low price (or no price) software like WordPress, Gimp and Scratch? How can we help kids use platforms like Youtube and Figment to share what they make? We’ve only scratched (no pun intended) the surface of possibilities. Do we want students to be consumers of information or creators and community builders? I know which I’d rather see and I’m worried about the priorities that I have been seeing.